We have successfully led a multi-million pre-series-A funding round for Horizm, one of the hottest SportsTech companies in Europe, with €750,000 raised from our investor network. This represents the first deal in our new partnership with well-known sports and entertainment entrepreneur Roger Mitchell.

Horizm provides a unique AI-powered digital audience platform which allows sports teams and leagues, as well as clients from the media and entertainment industries, to value and directly monetise their digital content and channels.

This is done through Horizm’s proprietary tech and valuation algorithms, and is based on a real time valuation model, which allows dynamic pricing of digital assets and targeting of specific consumer groups and geographies by media buyers. It is driven by rich data on fan engagement generated by sports teams’ content on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and their own channels.

Horizm Marketplace, Horizm’s groundbreaking audience matching tool, aggregates over $1.5bn of digital inventory, offering brands a convenient and effective route to target customers through the highly engaged medium of sports content.

This inventory is accessed through contracted agreements which see Horizm leverage artificial intelligence to provide sports and entertainment with the complete toolkit needed to value, benchmark and monetise digital audience engagement.

Horizm has already signed up 90 major rightsholders, across 4 continents, serving more than 300 properties such as European football giants Real Madrid, Chelsea and Borussia Dortmund, the Australian Open tennis championship and the West Indies and New Zealand cricket teams.

The current social media sports sponsorship market has been estimated to be worth around $25bn annually*. The market has been growing rapidly in recent years, creating a significant need for services that help both teams and sponsors analyse the performance of their digital sponsorship, identify the most valuable opportunities and generate more effective content.

This is the first deal in our new partnership with Roger Mitchell. Coming from a strategic finance background, he has been involved in financing innovation across creative industries like advertising, publishing and music at the likes of WPP, Panini and EMI. 

Roger was the founding CEO of the Scottish Premier League and represented Scotland on the UEFA Professional Football Committee. For 20 years, through his own advisory and investment business, he has invested in many of the most exciting SportsTech startups, with successful exits. He co-founded the leading international sports business podcast AreYouNotEntertained and is regularly included in lists of top influencers in sport.

We anticipate that this new partnership will see us investing in several businesses per year that are advised by Mitchell, who currently serves as a non-executive director on the board of Horizm.

Our CEO, Ian Zant-Boer, says:

“Horizm is a genuinely cutting-edge business that provides a service nobody else is able to match for sports teams and their sponsors. The fact that Real Madrid and Chelsea are already on board is a big vote of confidence.”

“The opportunity in this arena is huge. The value of digital asset sponsorship has clearly been proven but only Horizm has been able to create a frictionless marketplace that gets the best value possible for everyone involved.”

“We’re very excited to be working both with Horizm today and with Roger Mitchell in the future. Roger advises a group of enormously innovative and fast-growing businesses that have faced a funding gap at a key period in their development. It’s a great opportunity for Growthdeck to step in and help them reach their potential.”

Roger Mitchell adds:

“Keep your eye on this lot in 2022. They are going to be a major player in SportsTech and sport financing in general.”

 

 

* Source: Nielsen

 

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